This beautifully shot television film of a live Genoese performance of Il turco in Italia is a memorial tribute to the great Genoese stage designer, book illustrator and film-maker Emanuele “Lele” Luzzati who died in 2007 at the age of 85. His designs, and the stunningly beautiful costumes by his longtime collaborator Santuzza Calì, were originally seen at the 1983 Pesaro Festival. I remember that Pesaro production and, indeed, an earlier Il turco in Italia designed by Luzzati for Glyndebourne, where in 1963 he designed a famous Die Zauberflöte.

Luzzati was a master of pre-Romantic theatre design. He also loved “the play within the play”. Così fan tutte and Il turco in Italia were particular favourites, as was Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which he once designed to Stoppard’s personal delight.

In this pleasingly stylish and urbane Il turco in Italia we look through the proscenium arch to a stage that has on either side opera boxes with painted masked figures. Such backdrops as do descend are two-dimensional flats in the Baroque style. And yet the drama that is played out within this painted space is intensely human. I don’t recall seeing the puppet-master Poet (Vincenzo Taormina) more pointedly or more humanely played; and there is a similarly credible and touching bond between Don Geronio the cuckolded husband, superbly played by Bruno de Simone, and his flighty wife who fancies herself in love with the eponymous Turk. Myrtò Papatanasiu follows her compatriot Maria Callas in playing Fiorilla with a fine mix of wit and kittenish allure. Callas, however, played an edition that robbed her of her greatest scene: her stunned reading of Geronio’s letter barring her from their home and the aria that follows, eloquently sung here by Papatanasiu.

Simone Alaimo has presence and plausible technique as Selim; Antonino Siragusa is an agile, bright-toned Don Narciso. Jonathan Webb’s conducting is as spruce and stylish as the production itself. There is even pleasure to be had from the Overture, with Erica Vitellozzi’s brilliantly precise and insightful camerawork helping point up every last detail of Rossini’s irrepressible wit.